This Grandma Celebrated Her 98th Birthday With a Champagne-Filled, Turquoise Photoshoot

There was no stately birthday luncheon at the country club for this grandmother.

This fun-loving nanna celebrated her 98th birthday by dying her hair turquoise and wearing a tutu!

To celebrate Gladys’ 98th birthday, her granddaughter, Shannon Weikle, treated her to a colourful photoshoot — which featured Gladys dying her hair, sipping Prosecco straight from the bottle and destroying a cake with her bare hands.

“A lot of my friends are having babies and are either doing newborn photoshoots or smash cakes for their child’s first birthday,” Gladys’ 29-year-old granddaughter, tells PEOPLE.

“She’s the person I do all these fun things with, and that’s where the idea came in, and I wanted to do something special for her.”

Shannon has done other special things to mark her grandmother’s birthday over the years, such as getting matching maple leaf tattoos on their wrists when Gladys turned 95.

Hilariously, the tattoos almost didn’t happen because the shop needed a copy of Gladys’ ID to prove she was over 18, but she didn’t have one!

They’ve also discussed plans for her 100th birthday — Shannon is currently trying to convince her grandmother to go skydiving. She’s a braver woman than me!

“She is 100 percent girly-girl,” Shannon explains. “She loves to look nice and get dressed up, I thought the photoshoot would be a fun way for her to commemorate the occasion.”

Despite her sense of adventure, Gladys was somewhat nervous when it came to dying her silver hair a brilliant shade of turquoise blue for the shoot.

“I came over and I showed her the dye, and we just went to work,” her granddaughter explained. “When she saw herself, she was mortified!”

The photos were taken by Maryland photographer Cara Lynn McGilvrey and show a beaming Gladys surrounded by colourful balloons, sipping wine from a glass that reads, “98 and looking for a date.”

“I thought wine might be good because it would calm her nerves since she was a little nervous about getting her picture taken,” Shannon says. “We poured her a glass of wine to sip on and take pictures with, and then she just chugged it — she was pretty excited when we drove home!”

Go nanna!

When McGilvrey posted the photo set to her Facebook page, they received a lot of attention. The post has garnered more than 16,000 likes and shares, with many commenters expressing that they, too, wanted to put on similar shoots for their grandmothers.

Shannon says that her grandmother lights up when she hears about all of the attention she’s been getting, and they are both thankful the response has been nothing but positive.

“I’ll read her the comments and she’ll just giggle and can’t believe so many people care about what she’s doing,” she says.

“She thought people would think she had gone crazy. Hopefully, this inspires people to realize they are never too old to do anything or to enjoy life.”

Just lovely! We’d like to wish Gladys a very happy 98th birthday as well.

Source: Facebook/Cara Lynn Photography